The following is an excerpt from the CoachStart Manual.
What holds back most coaches in the early years is lack of confidence. The best way to bust through this barrier: coach fifty people! It doesn’t matter if it’s just a practice session or if it turns into three months of coaching.
Clients are “gold” for you – no matter what the fee. So don’t let your fee or lack of confidence stand between you and coaching many people.
Every client you have gives you:
- The feeling that you are really a coach, not a fraud
- A practice that looks a little more busy (“Sorry — that time slot is not available.”)
- The potential for referrals
- Free training!
- More and more confidence with every session you do, and lastly
- Possible revenue — either immediately or down the track
The following is an excerpt of one of David’s coaching sessions in Top Coaching Techniques.
David: Well it’s not quite a plan but it’s the beginning of a plan.
Client: Yeah.
David: Awesome. You got a pen?
Client: Yeah. I’m taking notes.
David: All right, you’re going to love this. Lots of stuff to soak up, so actually I might even send you a copy of the recording because I think there’ll be a lot here. Okay. To start, the writing of the article, I would suggest if you do this you don’t just do one. Writing articles, in fact everything you do here, should be part of a long-term plan. If you’re going to do the article approach, great. Work out when every single month you’re going to sit down and write your article. Have your list of journals or magazines that you’re going to send it to, and cultivate a relationship with them, and get yourself published every month.
Client: Every month?
David: Well, or every quarter or whatever it is, but it’s a system rather than – because it’s so easy to come up with 20 good ideas and try and do them all, but you may not get any impact out of it until the sixth month, when people start to know who you are and they’ve read your second article. So, if you are going to do this one.
The following is an excerpt from the CoachStart Manual.
Who would benefit from your talk and ideally would pay for it (associations, clubs, charities, corporations)? Some will pay; some are just a training ground, testimonial builder, and a place to get individual clients! Source them from friends, yellow pages, people in the speaking industry, Chambers of Commerce, Libraries, a local chapter of The National Speaker’s Association (NSA). All will have a list of service groups, associations, etc… that want and need speakers. Joining a Toastmaster group is also a great idea, and they have a speaker’s bureau which supports their members in getting speaking engagements.
Call or email your friends and colleagues and ask them which clubs they belong to which might need a speaker.
You might provide ‘lunch and learns’ at companies and organizations. These are for free or fee, and are provided during the employees’ lunch hour. It is a way for the company to provide self-development/educational programs and for you to get in front of decision-makers and show them what you can do. Your friends within corporations might be able to put you in touch with the right person who organises or approves these within the company.
The following is an excerpt from the book Get Paid For Who You Are.
Now it’s time to refine your offer and target market into an “elevator pitch”. an elevator pitch is you telling someone what you do in the time it takes to ride an elevator. Sometimes 10- 30 seconds is all you’ll have to state who you are and what you can do.
The beauty of an elevator pitch is that, in addition to helping you say with ease and confidence what you do and for whom, it also allows others to spread the word about you. So, the next time someone asks your friend, “What does Mollie do?” Your friend replies, “She helps small business owners get free publicity” or, “She teaches families of cancer patients how to support their loved one and cope”.
Here are more samples of “sizzling” elevator pitches:
- I help start-up biotech companies bring life-saving drugs to market faster.
- I show you how to make pottery at home in 5 easy steps.
- I help women 45 and older recover from divorce.
- I help people who need to buy or sell used heavy machinery.
- I show people how to save thousands of dollars on their plumbing expenses, by doing it themselves.
- I connect hikers with the trails just made for them.
The following is taken from David’s interview with Leza Danly in 10 Super Coaches.
What method did you find most effective in getting your initial clients?
First, do your personal inner work. Know what you want to create (the kind of coaching practice, the size, etc.) and more importantly WHY you want to create it. Invest the time to explore your motivation deeply. Because if your motivation is to prove you are good enough, or to run away from failure, or to get people to love and approve of you, or to exploit people, or any of many negative motivations, it won’t work. Often these motivations are deeply buried and we don’t realize they are at play. When you find the joy of service and align yourself with a motivation to contribute, things will turn around.
Once you feel confident that your motivation is clean, you need to confront your willingness to give yourself this dream career. This may sound like a no-brainer, but for most people it’s the biggest challenge. They limp along at a handful of clients, because they honestly feel deep down that to be paid really well for inspiring conversations and having lots of free time is too good to be true. They aren’t willing to receive it.
Second, once you’ve done the introspection, give lots and lots of sample sessions. You never enroll clients from talking about coaching, only from boldly giving yourself to the client in a sample session. Let yourself love. Let yourself care. They will either want it or they won’t. Don’t obsess on the ones who don’t. Just keep giving.
The following is taken from David’s interview with Michael O. Cooper in 10 Super Coaches.
What training, experience and qualifications did you have when you started coaching?
None! My first client told me they wanted to hire me before I even knew what coaching was. She gave me an article about coaching, told me I would be perfect for it, and wanted to hire me on the spot. I spent about four weeks reading all I could, enrolling in Coach U and hiring my own coach before our first session.
I subsequently discovered that I had been using a coach approach in managing teams, working with clients and developing strategy in my role as a management consultant.
What were the biggest doubts you had in your early months?
The need to be an expert! My own coach helped me see that I was rarely an expert in my role as a management consultant, but that I had a methodology, framework and best practices to help clients improve their businesses and systems – it was an easy shift to apply this same approach to my coaching business.
